When the World Came Crashing Down
by morallyambiguous
Summary: "Ino-chan, Ino-chan, where are you? Won't you come out to play with me?"


**Disclaimer: **If I owned Naruto, this crazy shit would definitely not happen.

**Number of words: **1,635

**Pairing: **Ino, Sakura, gen, sort of.

**Rating: **T

**Summary:** "Ino-chan, Ino-chan, where are you? Won't you come out to play with me?"

**Warnings: **I've never written one of these, so please be a little easy. As it moves forward I _will _get better

* * *

><p><em>Everything around me is dead. Mutilated to the point of no return. Bodies of ninja of all ranks lay splattered across the town. The citizens had long since been evacuated.<em>

_I bite back bile in my throat as I step over the torn off head of Kiba. His face caught in a never ending scream._

"_**Ino-chan, Ino-chan, where are you? Won't you come out to play with me?"**_

_I laid flat against the building I was taking refuge behind, heart pounding in my ears and breathing so hard that there was no doubt she could hear me. She was close. And the anticipation of feeling my blood on her hands was palpable. When did this start? How did this happen?_

"Hatake Kakashi has been attacked!" A nurse yelled as I pulled my hair back. Normally this case would have been given to Forehead, but she'd been missing for days.

Tsunade-sama stormed into the operating room. "Do you think it's the same person that took Forehead?"

She nodded her head. "Not now, Yamanaka. Shinji, Ichiro, close his other wounds, Yuuki, go get the antiseptic." The nurses froze on the spot.

"What are you waiting for? Get to work!" The nurses scurried to get their job done.

"How bad?" From here all I could see was his mutilated mouth and gouged out eye. The only one left was the Sharingan, wide open and spinning ominously.

We were in surgery for three hours. Finally managing to get him stable. I went home to get some rest and worry more about Forehead, I swear to God, when I find her I'm going to kill her for worrying me.

A messenger was at my window a couple of hours later. "Hokage-sama requests your presence at the Hospital immediately!"

I was there minutes later. "Tsunade-sama?"

"Follow me." Her face was grave as we walked through the almost deserted hospital. I didn't even see any graveyard shift nurses, the lights flickered, not an altogether uncommon occurrence but it made a shiver crawl up my spine anyway. We stopped at Kakashi's room. All I could wonder was _is he dead? _I wasn't prepared for the sight that greeted me. I don't think I'll ever be prepared for what I saw in that room and what I saw for the days afterward. He'd been stabbed in both wrists to hold him up. His Sharingan was still there but his other eye socket had been cut open again so that it had once again begun bleeding.

His face was once again cut open to give him a horrible, permanent, and no doubt painful, smile.

On the wall behind him were words written in his own blood. But I puked before I could get a good initial look. When I finally looked up the words were staring at me in bright red.

_Do You See Me Now?_

"H-how did this happen?" I yelled, if they could get Kakashi, no one was safe..

"We don't know how they got in without us noticing. But whoever did this, I swear we'll find them." Tsunade-sama clenched her fist.

I was scared. We didn't know? How could we not know? Weren't we the strongest Hidden Village? How did something this monumental escape our notice?

"D-do you think it was the same people who took Sakura-chan?"

"I… Don't know." And suddenly she looked older and I had to remind myself that she was nearing her sixties.

"HOKAGE-SAMA! There's been another attack!"

"WHO?"

"Uchiha Sasuke."

The hospital room was quiet. And then both of us were off like the devil was on our heels.

The scene we arrived at was not completely unexpected, but that didn't mean that I was prepared for it. I had just seen someone I had known and respected for five years murdered in the most excruciating way.

Sasuke-kun was hung from a tree by the back of his shirt, his eyes carved out. He probably would've survived, Kakashi had (if only briefly), if it weren't for the fact that his innards had been painstakingly carved out and formed into a mockery of the Sharingan. And a giant hole in his chest showed that his heart was missing. It was just gone.

Tsunade-sama put Naruto on suicide watch.

I read the autopsy report later, Sasuke-kun's that is. His eyes had been carved out pre mortem. He'd died when his heart had been taken from his chest. And the innards had been carved out post-mortem. It was very methodical, and relatively clean. The coroner had noted that it couldn't have been done by anyone but a doctor. I thought that it might have been Kabuto. What a fool I was.

I stared at the plastic bag they had found above its head. In it were a glass jar and a note.

The note read.

_Not So Great Now, Are You Uchiha?_

And in the jar was an onyx eye. Kakashi's eye.

Whoever was doing this was far from over. And I had a feeling that this was more personal than even the Hokage had thought it was.

Tsunade stepped into the room. Her eyes were red.

"There's been another attack."

Her voice was utterly broken.

"Who was it?" I was scared to hear the answer.

"Naruto."

And then I knew I had a right to be scared.

Without Naruto, what hope did we have?

"How?"

"Someone broke his seal enough so it just let pure, unadulterated kyuubi chakra through his system. He was burned alive from the inside." Her voice was monotone and her eyes were unseeing.

"Was there a note?"

Tsunade nodded solemnly.

_How Can You Protect Everyone If You Can't Even Protect Yourself?_

"Anything else? Anything missing?"

She pulled out a box. In it was a heart. Sasuke-kun's heart.

"The necklace was gone." She muttered. I didn't know what she was talking about.

Tsunade-sama was dead the next day. A poison killed her in her sleep. Naruto's necklace had been hung around her neck. And there was note.

_Mother Is God in the Eyes of a Child. _

_Too Bad You Aren't My Mother._

And then it all clicked into place_. I knew_. Sakura hadn't been kidnapped.

I remembered a conversation I had had with Sakura a few weeks before.

"_I'm so useless!" She yelled as she punched a tree in frustration. "Look at me, the fifth Hokage's apprentice and yet when I'm next to my team I am nothing! Hell, I don't even belong there! What have they got for me?" She was punching the tree again and again. Her blows cutting through it even though there was no chakra in her fists._

"_What do you mean they have nothing for you?" I asked calmly._

_Her eyes glared at the tree as if it had caused her great personal insult._

"_All Kakashi-sensei cares about is Sasuke-kun! And all Sasuke-kun cares about is beating Naruto! And all Naruto fucking cares about is becoming Hokage!"_

_She took a couple deep breaths._

"_And all Tsunade cares about is Naruto becoming Hokage." She laughed bitterly. "You know, she didn't even accept me as her apprentice because I had excellent chakra control. She accepted me as her apprentice because I was Naruto's teammate."_

"_JUST BECAUSE I WAS HIS FUCKING TEAMMATE!"_

"_All I ever got from her was a pat on the back and her paperwork." She sat on the stump of the tree she had been beating up._

"_Have you told them all this?" It wasn't good to keep feelings like this bottled up._

"_And risk being called an annoying weakling? Not a chance." _

_I turned around. But by the time I had she was gone._

She had left of her own free will.

I didn't want to believe it. She couldn't have been that mad, could she? There was only one way to know.

I ran as fast as my legs would carry me to the Hokage's office.

The room was on fire, the whole tower was on fire. No one was doing anything about it. No one was there. Konoha was burning.

I could feel my heart breaking.

Sakura'd done it.

I don't know if I got up minutes or hours later. They just kind of blurred together. But when I got up I knew what I had to do.

There she was, just sitting at her dining room table, drinking tea. She didn't look the least bit bothered.

…She didn't look like she had just killed her teammates… And then something came to me. She didn't have three teammates…

"Sakura, where is Sai?"

She had four…

She blew on her tea calmly. "Sakura's not here right now, would you mind leaving a message?" She chuckled.

"Sakura!"

"You know, it's amazing what a few shadow clones and a henge can do. You can have the whole village evacuated in an hour if you have fifteen or so supposedly alive chunin running around. It was shame I had to kill Iruka-sensei though. I rather liked him."

"What are you talking about? Where is Sai?" I screamed at her. She wasn't making any sense!

She pointed out the window to a blonde man riding on a clay bird.

"He's right there Ino."

"What do you mean he's right there?"

"Only that Deidara-san is currently using Sai's body to fulfill his last wish." She smirked.

"And what was that?"

"To destroy the birthplace of his killer…

… To destroy Konoha."

I stared at Sakura in horror. Destroy Konoha?

"Sakura, you can't-" I started.

"Too late."

The man on the bird exploded.

_She stood above me, kunai poised in her hand._

"_It was nice knowing you, Ino-chan."_

_She stabbed me in the heart._

_Sakura looked around at the mutilated bodies before her, and smiled._

"_Konoha down, Akatsuki to go."_


End file.
